Help with teaching reading comprehension comprehension instructional frameworks

Teachers ask questions such as “What is the best way to teach comprehension?” “Where can I find a research-based comprehension program?” “What about my students who can read fluently but

L A U R E N A I M O N E T T E L I A N G

J A N I C E A D O L E

Help with teaching reading comprehension: Comprehension

instructional frameworks

Five instructional frameworks to teach

reading comprehension are presented in

this article All five have been researched to

show their effectiveness in improving

reading comprehension Various aspects of

the frameworks are discussed to assist

educators in making instructional decisions

about their use.

After years of sitting on the “should be hot”

list with the other wallflowers,

comprehen-sion instruction is finally “hot,” at least

ac-cording to over 75% of the contributors to the

International Reading Association’s annual “What’s

Hot, What’s Not” list (Cassidy & Cassidy, 2004/

2005) Although comprehension instruction has

al-ways been an important part of reading research and

teaching, it has been somewhat overlooked in the

last few decades in favor of issues related to

begin-ning reading, phonics, and decoding

Attention to comprehension instruction has

in-creased recently, however, particularly in the

feder-al arena The influentifeder-al publication of Preventing

Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow,

Burns, & Griffin, 1998) included a focus on

read-ing comprehension and a review of

comprehen-sion literature The Reading Excellence Act and

Reading First efforts, while concentrating

primari-ly on earprimari-ly reading and emphasizing the teaching of

phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, did

in-clude wording on comprehension instruction The

National Reading Panel’s report Teaching Children

to Read(National Institute for Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000) also ad-dressed comprehension instruction, albeit not as much as some reading researchers believe they should (Graves, 2004), by identifying comprehen-sion as one component of its five-part curriculum

In 1999, the Department of Education’s Office

of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) began an initiative on reading education and formed the RAND Reading Study Group, which met from 2000 to 2002 The RAND group, which was composed of a panel of reading experts, greatly increased the attention to comprehension instruction by making reading with good compre-hension its primary topic and stating that one of our main purposes as reading researchers is to increase our knowledge about reading comprehension

in-struction The group’s report, titled Reading for

Understanding: Toward an R & D Program in Reading Comprehension(RAND Reading Study Group, 2002), encouraged OERI (now renamed Institute of Educational Sciences, or IES) to create a new Program of Research on Reading Comprehension This program has begun a series

of research grants for reading comprehension, be-ginning with several grants funded in 2002, and is expected to grow significantly in the future (Sweet

& Snow, 2003)

Despite all this recent research interest, and de-spite the many reports advocating the importance

of reading comprehension and its instruction, many

teachers are still not sure about how to teach

com-prehension When we ask them what they do, we

find they are always looking for more ideas and

more concrete ways to improve their students’

comprehension skills, even if they are using a

district-adopted basal reading program Teachers

ask questions such as “What is the best way to teach

comprehension?” “Where can I find a

research-based comprehension program?” “What about my

students who can read fluently but don’t understand

what they are reading?” “What can I do to support

my struggling readers?”

In fact, there are several research-based

comprehension instructional frameworks that

teachers can use to improve their students’

com-prehension The problem is that many teachers do

not know about these comprehension

instruction-al frameworks

What are comprehension instructional

frame-works? A framework is commonly defined as a set

of ideas or principles that provides the basis or

out-line that is more fully developed at a latter stage

When teachers use frameworks—a set of ideas or

principles—to organize their instruction, we can

say that they are using an instructional framework

The set of ideas or principles serves as an outline

for later developing more complete lessons for

their instruction A common instructional

frame-work for comprehension that many teachers know

is Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984)

This instructional framework is based on the

prin-ciples of teaching students four important

strate-gies: predicting, summarizing, asking questions,

and clarifying If teachers used this particular

framework, all their lessons would revolve around

teaching students these four basic strategies If

teachers simply put together a set of lessons to

teach comprehension, we would not say they are

using a framework Instead, teachers must put

to-gether the lessons based on some organizing

prin-ciples or ideas

Most instructional frameworks for

comprehen-sion are not scripted programs that educators can

purchase They are not found in teachers’ catalogs

of instructional materials And they are not simple

procedures that teachers can read about in an

arti-cle, like K-W-L (Ogle, 1986) or a graphic

organiz-er Information about these frameworks can be

found in several journal articles and books, some of

which are not easy to find Without assistance, it is

often too time-consuming for classroom teachers to get the information needed about the frameworks

in order to learn more about them and make deci-sions about using them

The purpose of this article is to assist teachers

in learning about several research-based instruc-tional frameworks for teaching comprehension Our goal is to provide enough information and ref-erences for teachers, literacy coaches, and adminis-trators so that they can determine if they would like

to use them

Selecting instructional frameworks

We used several criteria to select the instruc-tional frameworks for this article First, we exam-ined the research base behind many comprehension programs and frameworks We only selected frameworks or programs in which the whole pro-gram had been researched, rather than simply pieces of the program Second, we looked at the fo-cus of the comprehension instruction We selected

a balance, with half focusing on understanding a text and half focusing on using comprehension strategies Last, we looked at only those programs and frameworks that were less familiar to educa-tors We next discuss these criteria in more detail There are two types of “research-based” pro-grams or frameworks The first kind is the program

or framework that has many instructional activi-ties in it that are based on research Most current commercial programs claim they are “research based.” By that the developers of the programs mean that several instructional activities in them have been found to be effective in and of them-selves For example, a basal reading program con-tains many activities, like graphic organizers or cooperative learning These individual activities have a research base in their own right (NICHD, 2000) However, the total program or framework

has not been researched and found to be effective

The second kind of program or framework that

is research based is one in which the whole

pro-gram or framework has been researched, not just

the individual activities in the program For exam-ple, Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) is a familiar comprehension instructional framework Each of Reciprocal Teaching’s four comprehension components has been researched

individually and found to be effective for improving

comprehension But Palincsar and Brown also

conducted considerable research on the whole

framework itself, using all four of the components

together This is the true test of being “research

based.” The whole instructional framework has to

be shown to be effective, not just the individual

parts

The instructional frameworks we present in

this article have been tested as a whole in real

class-room settings Research on the whole framework

has shown that the individual activities together

im-prove comprehension The developers of the

frameworks discussed in this article have put all the

pieces of the framework together to see if they

work in the classroom to improve comprehension

This is the criterion we used to determine whether

a framework was research based

In addition to looking at the research base as

one selection criterion, we used a second criterion

to select instructional frameworks We were

inter-ested in the focus of the comprehension instruction

Comprehension instruction is typically divided into

two major categories: 1) instruction that focuses on

helping students understand the content of a

par-ticular text, and 2) instruction that focuses on

com-prehension strategies to help students understand

all texts (Pearson & Fielding, 1991; Tierney &

Cunningham, 1984) The first category focuses

mainly on students’ understanding of the content of

the particular text that they are reading The second

category focuses more on students’ understanding

the strategic process of comprehending what they

are reading and often uses texts more as ways to

practice using the process than as something

par-ticular from which to learn Currently, much more

attention is being paid to the second category,

which is often referred to as “comprehension

strat-egy instruction.”

The National Reading Panel’s report (NICHD,

2000), for example, concentrated exclusively on

comprehension strategy instruction in its

meta-analysis of reading studies The current popularity

of teaching comprehension strategies has become

somewhat problematic, in our view, because it may

distract from other parts of comprehension

instruc-tion—including understanding the content of a

giv-en text The National Reading Panel’s sole reliance

on strategy instruction can mislead educators into

thinking that comprehension strategies is the only

part of reading comprehension that needs to be taught

To provide some balance, we selected instruc-tional frameworks from both categories of compre-hension instruction Two of the five comprecompre-hension instructional frameworks we present in this article focus more on the reader’s understanding of the content of a given text being used Two frameworks focus on teaching the process of reading through comprehension strategies The fifth framework straddles both categories by teaching comprehen-sion strategies within the context of learning about

a specific topic

A final criterion used to select frameworks to present was to include only those frameworks that are less familiar to most audiences In doing so,

we excluded those frameworks that are very famil-iar, such as Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) Reciprocal Teaching has been dis-cussed widely; therefore, we feel no need to detail

it here Even so, our list is not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be

Table 1 presents the five comprehension in-structional frameworks discussed in this article and highlights particular characteristics of the frameworks The first characteristic is the main category of comprehension instruction to which the framework belongs, either understanding the content of a text, understanding the strategic process of reading, or both The second charac-teristic indicates the amount of teacher planning and time involved in using the frameworks The third characteristic involves the group format for lessons The fourth classifies the amount of time

it takes to complete a unit of study The fifth char-acteristic identifies the daily lessons as being var-ied or repetitive, and the sixth and final characteristic indicates whether the lesson plans used in each framework are created by the teacher or provided by the authors of the frame-work

We do not intend to suggest that any one framework is better than another, nor that one sort

of framework is more important than the other There is not research to support one framework over another Rather, we are presenting, both in the table and in the following sections, several impor-tant attributes about each framework to help educa-tors better understand them and make more informed decisions about using them

A focus on understanding the

content

In this section, two instructional frameworks

are described: the Scaffolded Reading Experience

(SRE) and Questioning the Author (QtA) The

focus of these frameworks is on understanding

specific texts being read The goal is deep

under-standing of a given text, not to teach a specific skill

or strategy These frameworks involve mostly short

lessons that last a few days Because the

instruc-tional focus is on understanding the content of a

particular text, the teacher’s planning time can be

considerable Using the framework as a guide,

teachers can develop a plan that is specific to the

text to be read During the actual implementation

of the plan, the teacher remains highly involved

The level of involvement may vary over the course

of the plan according to the decisions the teacher

makes when planning it

In part due to a high level of teacher

involve-ment, the two frameworks are easily adaptable for

students of varying reading abilities and can be

used with students in primary, middle school, and

high school classrooms Teachers can select the

ap-propriate text to be used, and through their use of

the frameworks, determine the best activities and

types of questions to help students understand that specific text

The Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE)

Isaac’s voice (all names are pseudonyms) rings out with

confidence as he reads aloud a page from Because of

Winn-Dixie (DiCamillo, 2000) Sarah, his reading

part-ner today, follows along closely, deeply engaged in the text “India Opal is naming the dog Winn-Dixie like the store because he’s not really hers and she doesn’t know his name!” she exclaims to Isaac Both Isaac and Sarah feel confident that they understand the chapter

as they read it because of the prereading activities they took part in yesterday The teacher had

activat-ed her fifth-grade students’ background knowlactivat-edge about being a newcomer, just like the main character, India Opal They learned about the characters and the plot of the story and shared stories about how they have felt as a newcomer The teacher read aloud the first few pages of the chapter and stopped to discuss the story, and then had them continue reading in pairs After everyone finishes the chapter today, their teacher will lead the class in a postreading activity The students will go back into the story to discuss how India Opal is beginning to resolve her feelings about being a newcomer

This fifth-grade teacher has used an instruc-tional framework known as a Scaffolded Reading

TABLE 1 Characteristics of five comprehension instructional frameworks

Teacher

depending on text)

on text)

the process

Experience (SRE) to carefully plan and implement

reading activities that will scaffold her students’

understanding of the book Because of Winn-Dixie.

An SRE is an instructional framework designed to

foster students’ understanding and engagement

with individual texts The SRE format (Graves &

Graves, 2003; Rothenberg & Watts, 1997; Tierney

& Readence, 2005) gives students supported

prac-tice in reading all types of text with

understand-ing, including those that otherwise would be too

difficult (Cooke, 2002; Fournier & Graves, 2002;

Graves & Liang, 2002) Over time, this repeated

practice can help students transfer the competence

and confidence they have developed with SREs to

reading without SREs, and ultimately increase

stu-dents’ ability to read and comprehend text

An SRE can be developed using novels, short

stories, and other texts, including expository texts,

at students’ instructional reading level At this

lev-el, students can read the text with support SREs

are similar to the directed reading activity (Betts,

1946) and the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity

(Stauffer, 1969) in that there are specific activities

that occur before, during, and after reading

The SRE has two major phases: the planning

stage and the implementation phase In the

plan-ning phase, the teacher considers the students

(es-pecially anything that might influence the students’

success or failure in reading a particular selection),

the text (including themes, vocabulary, and any

po-tentially difficult or engaging topics), and the

pur-pose for reading Based on the particular students,

text, and purpose for reading, the teacher plans

very specific activities for prereading, during

read-ing, and postreading that will help students better

understand the text and achieve the purposes set for

reading it

The implementation phase involves all three

sets of activities Prereading activities for an SRE

include such general categories as relating the

read-ing to students’ lives, preteachread-ing vocabulary, and

predicting During-reading activities are really

modes of reading, such as reading to students,

as-sisted reading, and silent reading Postreading

op-tions include graphic and artistic activities,

questioning, discussion, reteaching, and other

ac-tivities that allow students to revisit the text one

more time By choosing activities that will enhance

students’ experiences with and involvement in the

text, students will better understand the text, learn

from it, achieve the purposes for reading it, and en-gage with it

As reported in Table 1, teacher preparation time for an SRE is necessarily high, although the amount of teacher management time during the im-plementation of the SRE varies Certain activities will require more management time than others, depending on the particular activities selected by the teacher Group format can vary with the SREs Teachers can use whole-class instruction or small-group instruction Further, teachers may choose from a wide variety of activities that will help pro-mote students’ understanding and engagement with the text SREs can be developed for a few days or for other short periods of time, say a week or more, depending on the text involved While the daily les-sons may vary in length, content, and activities, they are all necessarily teacher generated

Additional information about the SRE and its research base, as well as SREs that can be down-loaded for classroom use, can be found at www.on linereadingresources.com

Questioning the Author (QtA)

In another fifth-grade class, the social studies focus has been on the Pilgrims and their arrival in the New World Today the students read about the Mayflower Compact and discover it was created because the Pilgrims had landed outside the land of the Virginia Company This, the author explains in their social stud-ies text, makes it necessary for the Pilgrims to make their own just and equal laws for the good of the colony After the students finish reading this explanation, the teacher stops them and asks, “What did the author tell

us is happening with the Pilgrims now?” Anthony

quick-ly raises his hand and responds that “they wanted to make the laws and rules.” The teacher follows up this reply by saying, “You said they wanted to make their own laws What do you mean by that?” Sean chimes in and continues, explaining that “they had to, ’cause they didn’t land where they wanted to at the Virginia Company.” The teacher then asks the students what

“just and equal laws” means Heidi raises her hand and responds, “Like maybe all religions can come in, and

be friends.” Jana adds on, stating, “I think it means they would share with each other, and they have to obey these rules.”

Talk about authors and their texts, like this one

in a fifth-grade classroom, is common when teachers use the Questioning the Author (QtA) instructional

framework QtA, like the SRE, is an instructional

framework that focuses on students’ understanding

of a given text Beck, McKeown, and their

col-leagues proposed that the purpose of reading is not

to extract information from text but rather to

con-struct meaning out of text They developed the QtA

approach to teach students to question what they

read, to think, to probe, to associate, and to critique

(Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997; Beck,

McKeown, Worthy, Sandora, & Kucan, 1996;

McKeown & Beck, 2004; McKeown, Beck, &

Sandora, 1996; McKeown, Beck, & Worthy, 1993)

QtA is conceptualized through four essential

features: 1) viewing the text as a fallible product

written by fallible authors, 2) dealing with the text

through questions that are directed toward making

sense of it, 3) questioning as students are reading,

and 4) encouraging student collaboration in the

construction of meaning (McKeown et al., 1993)

Once students understand the fallibility of authors,

they are then ready to read and interact with the text

differently from how they have done so in the past

A classroom using QtA is dominated by

teacher–student and student–student discussions

about texts QtA begins with the premise that

teachers use queries, like questions, to generate

high-level discussions about a text Queries can be

made about an author’s ideas or students’ ideas

Queries can be made about just one sentence or

longer units of text Further, queries can be made to

deepen and broaden students’ thinking about a text

As such, QtA can be a quite useful framework for

developing higher level thinking

In QtA, teachers query students about the text

with questions like “What is the author trying to

tell us here?” “Where is the author going with

this?” “Is that clearly stated?” Through queries

such as these, students work with the teacher and

with each other to construct meaning as they are

reading The goal is for teachers and students to

assist one another in building a coherent

under-standing of a text, not for teachers to evaluate

stu-dents’ responses The authors argue that student

discussions in constructing meaning from the text

are motivating to students and create high

engage-ment with the text as well

As reported in Table 1, teacher preparation

time for QtA is necessarily high Teachers will

have to prepare carefully, especially at the

begin-ning of QtA, where they will select and model the

queries used for specific texts Teachers are highly involved during the implementation of the frame-work as they help students generate and answer queries about a particular text Over time,

howev-er, teacher involvement decreases as students learn

to take over the discussion

Group format with QtAs is generally in whole-class or small-group discussions QtAs, like SREs, can be developed for a few days or for other short periods of time, say a week or more, depending on the length of the text Daily lessons will vary in the types of queries used, and these types depend on the nature of the text itself Lesson plans are quite varied and are teacher generated

Additional information about QtA, its research base, and transcripts of actual classroom discus-sions using QtA can be found in the book

Questioning the Author: An Approach for Enhancing Student Engagement With Text(Beck

et al., 1997)

A focus on understanding the strategic process

We have discussed two instructional frame-works that focus on teaching students to understand the content of a given text The two frameworks assist students in comprehending individual texts and give them supported practice at reading all types of text with understanding Students internal-ize the types of teacher talk and student thinking that occur during lessons Researchers argue that repeated practice can help students transfer the competence and confidence they developed with the frameworks’ support to reading without the support of these frameworks, and ultimately to in-crease students’ ability to read and comprehend texts

However, some researchers have argued that focusing on the understanding of an individual text may not, over time, transfer to other texts Instead, focusing on an individual text may foster teacher dependency, as readers come to rely on the teacher for providing the necessary prompts and activities (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Dole, Brown, & Trathen, 1996; Johnston, 1985) These researchers have argued that it is important for students to learn specific comprehension strategies that they can use

on their own with any text they read This changes

the focus of comprehension instruction from

un-derstanding the content of a given text to learning

comprehension strategies to use with any text

In this section, we describe two instructional

frameworks whose purpose is to teach students

specific strategies for comprehending text:

Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) and

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) Unlike the

first two instructional frameworks, these

frame-works focus on activities that specifically teach

comprehension strategies that students can use with

any text they read Here the text content is not

im-portant; what is most important is active

engage-ment with text using a set of comprehension

strategies

Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)

Madeline, Tyler, Latashya, and Amber are at work in a

cooperative learning group with students of mixed

abil-ities They have a text to read, each student with his

or her copy in hand The students also have a set of

four cards they use to guide their reading Amber

be-gins the session by reading the title of the chapter of

their text, “Women in the Civil War.” Then she reads

from her first card, the preview card “What do we know

about that topic already and what do we think we will

learn about it?” Each student begins to look at the

pic-tures and subheadings in the text, and a few jot down

notes After a few minutes, Amber, who is today’s

group leader, tells her group it is time to share with

their partners what they know about the topic and what

they think they will learn about today The students

share in pairs for a few minutes and then begin to read

the text.

CSR is a framework originally designed to aid

students at risk and those with learning disabilities

to understand texts used in the content areas

(Bremer, Vaughn, Clapper, & Kim, 2002; Klingner

& Vaughn, 1998, 1999; Klingner, Vaughn, Dimino,

Schumm, & Bryant, 2001; Klingner, Vaughn, &

Schumm, 1998; Vaughn, Klingner, & Bryant,

2001) This instructional framework is a good

ex-ample of the focus on using comprehension

strate-gies to understand all texts In CSR the goal is to

teach students four specific comprehension

strate-gies they can use with all the informational and

ex-pository texts they read As such, the focus is on

developing students’ routines and procedures for

understanding any expository text they read As can

be seen from the example, the text is not the focus

of instruction for CSR The individual texts stu-dents read are secondary to stustu-dents’ learning how

to use the comprehension strategies with many dif-ferent informational and expository texts

In CSR, students in cooperative learning groups move through four cards, based on four key comprehension strategies, to read and understand their texts First, students use the Preview card to look for key features of the text, brainstorm what they already know about the topic, and predict what they will learn about the topic when they read the text Students use their CSR learning logs to record this information and share it with their groups Next, students read a passage from the text look-ing for “clicks” and “clunks,” that is, monitorlook-ing when they come to a word, concept, or idea that they do not understand (a “clunk”) Clunk Cards, or short prompts on individual cards, are reminders for students of strategies they can use to figure out the meaning of the misunderstood word or concept

At the end of the passage, students use the Get the Gist card to determine the most important ideas in the passage The process is then repeated with the next passage After the entire text is read, students use the Wrap Up card to help them generate a list of questions with answers that show that they under-stood the most important information in the text The teacher introduces CSR to students by first teaching it to the whole class Through modeling and think-alouds, the teacher shows students how each of the four key comprehension strategies is used After students are proficient in the use of the individual strategies, the teacher models how to use all four together when reading text Eventually stu-dents are divided into small, mixed-ability groups

to practice collaboratively using the strategies in reading and understanding a particular text Within the groups, each student has a defined and mean-ingful role that helps to keep the group on task and

to use the strategies correctly

As shown in Table 1, the teacher is heavily in-volved in the introduction of CSR, although the actual planning time is less because the introduc-tory lessons have been scripted out for teachers in a manual This introductory period can take a sig-nificant amount of time, and students continue to need scaffolding during the early work in groups Eventually, however, the teacher’s role becomes minimal as students become more practiced in using the strategies Cue sheets that outline the

procedures to be followed and prompt students in

using the cards and conducting the activities

ap-propriately help scaffold the students’ learning

Over time, teachers focus more on monitoring the

groups and providing ongoing assistance as

need-ed The length of a unit in CSR is usually a

semes-ter CSR students are grouped in cooperative

learning groups, usually four students of mixed

abilities Once the strategies have been modeled

and explained by teachers, the lessons themselves

are repetitive, because students, using different

texts, repeat the same four procedures with each

text they use Finally, lesson plans are provided by

the authors, leaving less work for teachers to do

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS)

“I’m the Coach,” says third-grade student Julie.

“You’re the Reader so you gotta read first.” José,

Julie’s partner and a more advanced reader, begins to

read aloud from Doctor De Soto Goes to Africa (Steig,

1992) At the end of five minutes of reading, a bell rings

and Julie says, “Now it’s my turn” and begins to read

aloud the same passage Jose was just reading José

stops her and helps several times The bell rings again

after five minutes, and Julie begins to retell the

pas-sage to José Once she has finished, José reads his

prompt card, “Okay, what happened first?” he reads

from his prompt card “See, Dr De Soto is a dentist

mouse They get a letter to go to Africa to help an

ele-phant that has a toothache.” “Then what happens?”

prompts José, once again using his prompt card “Dr.

De Soto and his wife go on a ship.”

The peer-tutoring evident in this classroom is

a key element in the instructional program

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), a

multiple-strategy program developed to improve reading

comprehension for elementary and middle school

students (Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, & Simmons,

1997; Fuchs et al., 2001; Mathes, Fuchs, Fuchs,

Henley, & Sanders, 1994; Mathes, Howard, Allen,

& Fuchs, 1998) Like CSR, PALS focuses on

teaching students a set of comprehension

strate-gies that can be used to help students understand

any text they read Here they are using Dr De Soto

Goes to Africa, but the strategies will be transferred

to many other texts over time

PALS consists of three basic activities in which

two students, a higher reader and a lower reader,

are paired together to take on the roles of “Coach”

and “Reader.” Using a text at the instructional

read-ing level of the lower reader, each partner reads the text aloud to the other for a period of 5 minutes The higher reader always reads first, serving as a model for the lower reader At the end of 5 minutes, the lower reader reads the same passage for the next 5 minutes After the 10-minute reading ses-sion, the lower reader “retells” the passage to the higher reader The higher reader prompts the

low-er readlow-er with a prompt card saying, “What hap-pened first?” and “What haphap-pened next?” This retelling in sequence continues for 2 minutes Next, partners take part in an activity called paragraph shrinking Readers continue reading the same passage they began in the partner read but with no rereading Each reader reads one para-graph, stopping after the paragraph and telling the main idea of the paragraph Readers take turns reading the next consecutive paragraph and telling the main idea Prompts for this activity include cards saying, “Who or what was the paragraph about?” and “Tell the most important thing about the who or what.” As in the partner read, the stronger reader always begins reading first, serv-ing as a model for the less strong reader

Finally, in the last activity, called prediction re-lay, the reading continues, only with larger units

of text and a new activity This activity has four steps: (1) reasonably predict about what will hap-pen next, (2) accurately read half a page, (3) accu-rately check the prediction, and (4) correctly summarize the most important information This activity continues for five minutes per reader, again with the stronger reader going first Readers and Coaches correct word-recognition errors as they occur throughout the session

As seen in Table 1, PALS, like CSR, requires considerable teacher involvement in introducing the program Teachers provide extensive modeling, explanation, and guided practice to teach students the strategies of finding the main idea, summariz-ing, and predicting before they begin the tutoring sessions Teachers continue to play a moderate role even after students become more self-directed in their use of the activities They continue to provide direct support to students during the tutoring ses-sions, helping them to correct errors and assisting them on the use of the strategies, and giving out points to partners for the correct application of the activities The length of time for a PALS unit is about 30 minutes a day for three days a week in

15-week sessions Additional information about

PALS, its research base, and information about a

manual for using PALS can be found on its

web-site, www.peerassistedlearningstrategies.net

A combined instructional

framework

Finally, there is at least one particular

instruc-tional framework that combines comprehending the

content of a particular text with learning to use

com-prehension strategies This framework,

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI), motivates

and engages students with knowledge about a

spe-cific topic and comprehension strategies spespe-cifical-

specifical-ly designed to learn more about the topic

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction

(CORI)

Elena and Darrin huddle around Jean-Marc as he turns

the pages of an immense encyclopedia of airplanes and

helicopters “I think we should look in the Table of

Contents to find the stuff on commercial jets,” Elena

suggests As the students turn to the Table of

Contents, they notice how long the section is “Let’s

practice our searching for information with this one,

okay?” says Darrin Their teacher stops by the group

and helps to remind them of the important steps in

searching for information in a piece of text Jean-Marc

writes down a few ideas about “searching for

informa-tion” in his notebook, and soon the students begin

searching through the section looking for information

on 747s “I’m really starting to get how these huge

planes stay in the air!” comments Darrin as the

stu-dents finish with the encyclopedia and begin looking

through a pile of picture books on planes.

Small cooperative groups of students pursuing

knowledge about a particular topic of interest are a

common sight in classrooms where teachers are

us-ing CORI CORI is an instructional framework

specifically designed to assist teachers in

motivat-ing students to learn conceptual knowledge about

content area subjects through the use of

compre-hension strategies (Guthrie, Anderson, Aloa, &

Rinehart, 1999; Guthrie & Cox, 1997; Guthrie et

al., 2000; Guthrie et al., 1998; Guthrie et al., 1996;

Swan, 2003) As such, this framework combines

learning about content with learning

comprehen-sion strategies

There are four phases of the CORI framework

In the first phase, observe and personalize, students become motivated and engaged in a subject area through direct observation and personalization One way to do this is through direct experiences For example, one CORI unit has the teacher bring

in hermit crabs for students to observe As they ob-serve, they ask questions, notice details, and gain motivation to learn more about these crabs In the second phase, search and retrieve, students gather information about hermit crabs They use many dif-ferent kinds of texts to read and learn from In ad-dition, the teacher teaches various search strategies

so students will have success in their search for in-formation After students search and retrieve, they then can comprehend and integrate, the third phase

of CORI In this phase, they learn and gain infor-mation about hermit crabs Here more comprehen-sion strategies are taught to students to help them comprehend what they read Finally, in the com-municate to others phase, students find meaning-ful ways to present their information to their peers CORI is similar to SREs and QtAs in that one

of its goals is to assist students in learning content CORI consists of units of instruction on specific science or social studies topics that motivate stu-dents to learn In SREs and QtAs, though, instruc-tion is focused on understanding individual texts;

in CORI, instruction is focused on understanding

a topic that is learned through the various texts CORI is similar to CSR and PALS in that one

of its goals is to teach students how to use compre-hension strategies to understand any kind of text they come across The focus of CORI, however, is

on learning comprehension strategies in the context

of extensive and intensive reading of many texts about a particular topic The goal is not only to learn the strategies but also to gain information through the use of strategies

At the center of the CORI model is the goal of student motivation and engagement Motivation and engagement occur as CORI students have di-rect experiences with a topic and as they get the information they need and want about that topic Teachers encourage the students to constantly ap-ply the strategies in their daily work, to ask and answer questions, and to use their prior knowledge

as they learn about the specific topic The CORI framework emphasizes students’ autonomy during

instruction, encouraging students to make

deci-sions and choices throughout the unit

As seen in Table 1, the amount of teacher

plan-ning time it takes to prepare to use the CORI

in-structional framework, like the SRE and QtA, is

considerable Teacher management during the

im-plementation of the unit is also high, especially at

the beginning, when teachers scaffold students in

gaining knowledge about the topic, in practicing

the comprehension strategies, and in learning to

better collaborate with their peers Over time,

though, teachers reduce the amount of support to

students, as students become more independent in

their learning and their use of the strategies CORI

has multiple group formats for instruction, from

whole-class discussions about comprehension

strategies to small-group work on particular topics

of interest CORI units can last a few weeks to

sev-eral months The daily lessons vary quite widely

with CORI, and lessons are teacher generated

be-cause they depend so highly on the topic of the

unit Additional information about CORI, its

re-search base, and lessons using CORI can be found

on its website, www.cori.umd.edu/index.php

Choose the best framework for your

class

In this article we presented five comprehension

instructional frameworks to show educators

differ-ent ways of organizing and teaching reading

com-prehension All of these instructional frameworks

have been researched as a whole and found to be

effective in improving students’ reading

compre-hension We believe that each of the frameworks

we present is an excellent example of

research-based comprehension instruction The frameworks

vary along a number of dimensions, such as focus

of instruction, grouping format, amount of teacher

planning, support and assistance, length of time

for completion of a unit of instruction, and kinds

of texts used for instruction

We did not present the frameworks in any

par-ticular ranking order, and we do not imply that one

framework is better than another We do think that

teachers need to be the instructional decision

mak-ers in selecting the frameworks that will work best

for the needs of their particular students, based on

their practical and professional knowledge We hope this article assists teachers in this process

Liang teaches at the University of Utah (Department of Teaching and Learning, 1705

E Campus Center Drive, Room 142, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9256, USA) E-mail to

Lauren.Liang@ed.utah.edu Dole teaches at the same university.

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